The man who tried to fake an element

The rumours are indeed true, I have a Twitter and Patreon. Check the description for the links. Also, ask me questions for my (very delayed) Q&A! FOOTNOTES BELOW, THEY HAVE SPOILERS SO BEST READ AFTER WATCHING ******************************************************** 1. You’ll notice I didn’t mention a neutrino as part of the beta-minus decay. This is partly because I was lazy, but also because the neutrino wasn’t a widely accepted concept at that point, and Fermi actually had a paper rejected for trying to account for its existence. 2. The nuclide half-life data included in my version of the chart was sourced from NuBASE 2020, Chinese Physics C45, 030001 (2021). This dataset distinguishes between known half-lives, estimated half-lives, and nuclides whose half-lives are so small that they are unknown. I removed the nuclides with unknown half-lives for my chart. See the link in the description for an interactive version of the table. 3. Only a select number of isotopes on the nuclide chart have labels. I labelled every stable isotope (in brown), and for the unstable isotopes I only labelled the one with the longest half-life for each element. Note that the isotope with the longest half-life is not necessarily the one that was created for each element discovery. 4. The half-lives on the 3D nuclide chart are not plotted linearly (or logarithmically for that matter) as it would be impossible to show the differences between half-lives in the realm of nanoseconds and half-lives in the realm of years in a way that didn’t completely flatten half the chart. The standard way to plot them is to use the quantile method, where you take all the values (~3000) and rank them from smallest to largest, which the height of each pillar being their rank (so 1, 2, 3…3000). I then made a color gradient using 10 distinct colours, and if a pillar was in the first 10% of the population they got the darkest blue, the next 10% got a lighter blue, etc. 5. The following elements were first synthesized in labs before they were discovered in trace amounts in nature: Technetium, promethium, astatine, neptunium, and plutonium. For many years it was assumed that Uranium was the heaviest naturally occurring element, but this was actually disproven by Darleane Hoffman, when she found trace amounts of Plutonium-244 in ancient pieces of rock. 6. The Lanthanides and Actinides (the two seemingly detached rows of the periodic table) are a bit misleading. They’re put below the main table for space reasons, but really they fit right in the middle of the table next to Barium and Radium, leading to a table that is comically wide, too wide to be printed cleanly in a textbook. It should be noted that the periodic table during Fermi’s time didn’t look like the modern one I showed in the video. For a long time the correct position of the Actinide and Lanthanide groups were a bit of a mystery. It was actually Glenn Seaborg’s suggestion in the mid-1950s that put them where they are today, which was one of his most important contributions to chemistry. 7. Berkeley should technically also have a claim to element 43, but they just didn’t realize it. Emilio Segre, one of Fermi’s protégés, borrowed a spare filter from one of Berkeley’s accelerators. He found a lump of element 43 on it that they had unknowingly created, and he got the credit for detecting it. Many labs other than Berkeley worked to fill in the gaps of the periodic table, as well as filling in the gaps in the nuclide chart. Finding new elements gets you the glory, but finding new isotopes is also important for getting a full understanding of an elements properties. 8.If we’re being technical a superheavy element is one which has an atomic number greater than 103. This term distinguishes them from elements 90-103 which make up the Actinide series. In my version of the periodic table I group every element above 103 in the same category for simplicity, but there are other ways you could group them. If you check with Google for example they actually call 104 to 108 part of the transition metals, and everything higher is considered unknown. In theory everything up to 112 should also be part of the transition metals, but that’s mostly going off of the table’s columns and not so much measured observations. 9. The price for one gram of an element is going to vary a lot depending on the specific isotope. Also Einsteinium isn’t commercially available to buy anyway, and it’s only ever been produced in the order of micrograms, so Jeff Bezos couldn’t just drop $27 million out of nowhere. 10. The California town of Livermore is home to another strange oddity. A firehouse contains the world’s longest burning lightbulb. It’s been going since 1901. It could burn out tomorrow, or maybe even 15754 years from now. 11. Technically it’s 221 totals winners for the Nobel prize in physics now, didn’t beat the announcement for this year. 12. Masataka Ogawa seems to have misidentified element 75 as element 43 back in 1908 (both of which were undiscovered at the point). Both elements are in the same column but different rows, so the chemical properties would be similar. If it had been correctly identified Japan would have 2 elements under its belt, not just 1. 13. During the IUPAC naming section I mention that 9 elements needed official names, even though I only show 8 getting named. When writing this I forgot that Mendelevium was not officially recognized as the name for #101 until 1997, even though Berkeley had the only real claim to it. IUPAC just lumped it in with the rest of the contentious elements (102-106). 14. Lawrence Livermore Labs had in fact teamed up with Berkeley for the discoveries of prior elements, so they were not new to the element hunt. However their team-up with Dubna gave them a huge leg-up over Berkeley and eventually made them the leading US lab in the element hunt. 15. Victor Ninov was fired in May 2002, but the public retraction of the paper did not go through until July 2002. It was only at this point that the media picked up on the story. Berkeley initially did not name Ninov as the reason for the retraction but the media was able to put 2 and 2 together. 16. Flerovium is technically not named after Georgy Flerov. The Americans refused to let an element be named after someone who was integral to developing the first Soviet nuclear weapon, so the element is actually named after the Flerov Laboratory (which itself, it named after the man). 17. I mention in the first chapter that it was a group in Berlin that figured out Fermi’s mistake, and explained it by describing nuclear fission. This group included Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. Hahn went on to win the Nobel for this, while Meitner did not, despite being nominated a few dozen times (Hahn and Meitner were good friends, so he wasn’t happy about this either). It’s one of the most clear-cut cases of sexism in the Nobel ceremony’s history. To make up for this, she is now the namesake for element 109, one of only two women to have that honour.

"Hey, uh, Fermi? I've got good news and bad news. Bad news, you didn't make new elements. Good news, you created a whole new branch of science."

I completely forgot this was about a fake element, I got so invested in the element race

science is insanely interesting when you're not being forced to learn it

That poor woman Darlene. They screwed her around early in her career, pushed out again at a landmark moment, only to be kicked in the gut towards the end of her profession. Damn shame.

It must've been a real roller coaster of emotions to win the Nobel Prize for the elements you discovered, then be told you didn't find new elements, only to then be told you just... exploded a whole atom.

The only decay chain that Ninov actually witnessed was that of his own credibility.

Thank you Fermi for a world without the element "fascium".

21:06 "so true bestie" in regards to an Einstein quote took me tf out

My takeaway from these documentaries is that the most dangerously tempting source in physics is "I made that shit up"

Imagine being a student while all this was happening, gotta keep re-memorizing the periodic table

R.I.P. Albert Ghiorso, the man who discovered 12 elements. 1915-2010.

I’ve watched this video countless time but I just realized that the weird signal you mention at 36:58 is ninov’s attempt to fake 112 you talked about later at 1:07:10. This video is so well made!

The fact that this entire documentary was filmed on two locations: The periodic table, and the timeline is so impressive, considering how interesting it is

Nobody has considered the possibility that the reason Ninov kept happening to detect new elements whenever he was around, and the detections stopped when he left, is because his body simply emits exotic matter

Worth noting: While Enrico Fermi discovered Fission, he dismissed it outright until Hahn and Meitner confirmed it themselves, and then he realized what he'd done.

I was learning chemistry in school around at that time. We had a periodic table on the wall went until 108 or 109 (I don't remember clearly, I only remember, that bohrium was already there, but I'm not sure about hassium and meitnerium). The one in the textbook went further but elements 110-118 were kinda funny: they had dotted lines and their names were stuff like unununium and ununpentium - basically the Latin name of their number. I asked my teacher, why these ones aren't featured on the periodic table on the wall and why they look and are named different than the others (I also learned Latin in school, so I knew where they names came from). My teacher said, that elements are still discovered to this day and there are some arguments about how they should be named, that's why they use these placeholder names. This was the time, when rutherfordium was still called kurchatovium in some textbooks (I grew up in a former Eastern Bloc country), so we were aware of naming controversies. I've never thought, that my teacher was refering to this, when he was talking about "some arguments"... On the other hand, it's understandable, that he doesn't wanted to talk about a still ongoing scandal in the scientific world with a group of 13 year olds who just started to learn chemistry.

As a bulgarian i just want to say, faking an element is the most bulgarian thing ever

Fermi’s story was fascinating like, imagine trying to discover something and then being like “actually you’ve discovered a new form of energy and also have enabled the creation of a great and terrible weapon that will end the war”

Sometimes its easy to forget just how fascinating everything is. Being able to have a visual representation of the elements is just a tiny part of what composes everything. It's a bit overwhelming knowing that we live in harmony between so much things that happen all around us without even noticing it.